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The BIOS

The main BIOS screen is what we have come to expect from an Award BIOS on a Gigabyte board; note the MB Intelligent Tweaker on the bottom left.

If you press Ctrl-F1 you enable the "expert" options... which are very helpful for those of us who like to tweak our systems :-)

The expert option only adds a "Top Performance" choice to the main menu, but it significantly enhances the MB Intelligent Tweaker screen... as we will show you later.

The Standard CMOS Features page lets you set the Time, Date, configure the options for the IDE channels, legacy floppy support, and Halt On error. You can also see an example of one of the IDE channel configuration screens.

The Advanced BIOS features screen lets you set the boot priority, enable/disable Hyper-Threading (if your processor supports it); limit the CPUID and so on. The Integrated Peripherals screen allows you to enable/disable the on-board peripherals.

The Power Management Setup lets you control the ACPI settings including what events will cause the system to power back up. The PnP/PCI Configurations screen allows you to control PCI 1 and 2 IRQ assignments.

The PC Health screen allows you to monitor system voltages and fan speeds; and allows you to set warning temperatures and fan speeds.

Now we come to the most interesting part of the BIOS... the "MB Intelligent Tweaker". (Please note: the "Robust Graphics Booster" menu item did not fit on the screen. We left it on Auto.) This is where those of us who cannot resist tweaking the best possible performance out of our systems want to be.

The CPU Clock ratio lets you adjust the multiplier used by the processor (that is, if your processor lets you adjust it!). Our P4 560 allowed multipliers from 14 to 18.

Remember how earlier I mentioned the hidden expert mode? Look at what we get if we enable it:

See how we now see the exact memory timings? This lets us override the SPD settings, and hopefully run our memory at its full potential. As you can see, we can control each memory timing parameter individually.

We can also control memory, PCI-E, FSB, SATA and CPU voltages - very helpful when overclocking a system.

There are some more screens, but we've covered all the interesting ones above. From the screens you can see how rich some of the tweak features are, and I must say, I really like how tweakable this board has shown itself to be.